Common Objects / Gewöhnliche Objekte

The intervention presented by Selena Savić and Gordan Savičić was a temporary engagement with the special exhibition »Curious Communication: Unusual Objects and Stories from the Collection« at the Museum für Kommunikation, as well as the beginning of their new project »Antenna Fieldguide«. During the Long Night of the Museums, the two artists invited visitors to take part in performative guided walks through the exhibition with antenna objects they had specially created. The guided tours developed by the artists expanded the references of the exhibition through narratives around the various types and forms of antennas as elementary infrastructure of our contemporary communication and thus as everyday, hidden objects that are frequently encountered in urban and rural landscapes and yet are foreign to the eye. The following day, in a subsequent public writing workshop, results were collected that were included into the »Antenna Fieldguide« – a new project by the two artists that assumes that nature and technology are only separated from each other in the imagination, but are actually mixed.

The Fieldguide collects artistic representations of synthetic nature – antennas as an everyday feature in the landscape, as ordinary but invisible objects mounted high up on building roofs and tall masts. The sprawl of such antenna objects thus naturalises them as everyday infrastructure that sometimes even mimics nature.

Credits

This work was commissioned for Von Antennenwäldern und Wellenozenanen in Berlin, 2022. Thanks to Shintaro Miyazaki, Birgit Schneider and Daniela Silvestrin for generous support and curation.